Recent Submissions

This paper examines the role of museums as repositories of cultural meaning and symbolic capital. As educational and cultural institutions, museums serve to legitimise works of art within the frame of an art historical context. However, our comparative case study reveals how the taken-for-granted role of the museum as an allegedly unbiased platform for disseminating the arts can be usurped for economic or political ends. Using the cultural settings of the Hong Kong Museum of Art and the Venez...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of the field of visual arts marketing in the development of wider branding theory and practice. Drawing on examples from visual artists and the art mechanism that connects them, the paper reveals how artists and art professionals foster various types of capital (social, cultural, symbolic) as a way of developing a brand name, ensuring longevity in the field, and gaining financial value on the market. Design/methodology/approa...

Discourse is important to society as it encapsulates who we are and how we think and, through habitualized practice, justifies the way we do things. Over time and through practice, socially constructed discourses become fact-like, thereby ensuring their continuity and relevancy for society. Once habitualized, practices may appear fixed and constant, unless of course, there is a change in discourse. Here I examine one such case where a shift in the overarching discourse has had a very palpable...

This paper explores the social dynamics by means of which market forces are enacted at the level of everyday consumption. In particular, it draws on Holt's (2002) notion that as 'unruly bricoleurs', consumers kick-start processes of market adjustment and innovation through improvising ways to negotiate the demands of daily life. In this way, consumers can become active players in realising new possibilities for identity construction and empowerment that involve the creative re-appropriation o...

Abstract: Purpose – To investigate the extent of retail change in the UK grocery sector over the last 30 years. Design/methodology/approach – In 1980 a press article by Richard Milner and Patience Wheatcroft attempted to anticipate retail change by 1984. Taking that as a template we examine how retail did, in fact, change over a much longer timescale: with some unanticipated innovations in place even by 1984. We are assisted by academic research in progress at the time on grocery retailing an...

This community contains ePrints and eTheses produced by Marketing and Retail staff and students.